The agency has been linked to illicit Nazi gold to fund its early operations. [36] The CIA, which was then directed by future president George H. W. Bush, provided Noriega with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as payment for his work in Latin America. Because Blandn cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he spent only 28 months in prison, became a paid government informer, and received permanent resident status. These tribesmen continued to grow, as they had for generations, the opium poppy. Having no way to transport their opium, the Hmong were faced with economic ruin. Editor's Note: The ongoing relationship between Drug Trafficking and the CIA has been fairly common knowledge for the past 45 years and was well documented by Alfred McCoy's, . [46] Mahmud Karzai told Gerald Posner: "This is being coordinated by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service). California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein also took note and wrote to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno, asking for investigations into the articles. From August 1820, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[15][16] which claimed: For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [27] McManus found Blandn and Meneses's financial contributions to Contra organizations to be significantly less than the "millions" claimed in Webb's series, and no evidence that the CIA had tried to protect them. CIA and Contra cocaine trafficking Senator John Kerry's 1988 U.S. Senate Committee on . The article suggested this was in retribution for Ross testimony in the corruption case. 7.6 Rate this 82 Metascore An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico. [36] Operation Just Cause, whose ostensible purpose was to capture Noriega, pushed the former Panamanian leader into the Papal Nuncio where he surrendered to U.S. authorities. ", The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report[45] was released on July 23, 1998. After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. Fox News had a segment with Geraldo Rivera that shows how the U.S. government (in this case, the U.S. Marines) is involved in Afghanistans heroin production with Washingtons approval of course. The series ran from October 2022, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. The NBC news report said that the CDC admitted that heroin has become an epidemic since 2002, The CDC reports that between 2002 and 2014 the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths more than quadrupled and more than 10,500 died nationwide in 2014.. It is very clear that the CIA has been very much involved with drug dealings, Paul said. in Central America", "Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal", "Clandestination: Arkansas; Mena Is a Quiet Little Place. There is a limited number of planes, pilots and landing strips. The CIA spokesman responding to the allegation called it "ridiculous" to suggest that the agency had anything to do with the murder of a US federal agent or the escape of his alleged killer. Another example of drug trafficking is that person then going out and selling his homemade meth to the public. In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The War in Afghanistan was mainly about producing opium which did end up in thestreets of Iran, Russia and China. A CIA internal investigation found that agents had worked with drug traffickers to support the Contra program, but found no evidence of any conspiracy by CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States. "[52], The report also stated that former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III alleged that during the 1980s, Ilopango Airport in El Salvador was used by Contras for drug smuggling flights, and "his attempts to investigate Contra drug smuggling were stymied by DEA management, the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador, and the CIA". Three officials told journalists that they considered these reports "reliable." However, abusing Opioids can also lead to heroin use. Because of the war, the Hmong depended upon opium poppy cultivation for hard currency. However, during the Contra era, CIA worked with a variety of people to support the Contra program. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported back in 2015 thatheroin use in the United States increased 63% from 2002 through 2013.Fast forward to 2016, heroin is sweeping across the United States at unprecedented levels. [56] In 1986, the agreement was modified to require the CIA to stop paying agents who it believed were involved in the drug trade. BNDD agents immediately felt the impact of the CIA's involvement in drug law enforcement operations within the United States. And in return, large shipments of narcotics flowed . [41] After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997. At the end of March, however, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. 7 Min Read. She questioned whether the U.S. government paid or organized operatives to . A number of writers have alleged that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in cocaine trafficking during the 1980s. The heroin epidemic resembles the days whenCrack cocainebecame the major drug that destroyed communities across the United States and other parts of the world including the Caribbean that began in the early 1980s. ), Wisdom Quarterly; Alfred W. McCoy (voxfux.com) The author of this research is Professor of Southeast and Asian History at the University of Wisconsin -Madison Alfred W. McCoy, who wrote The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. July 17, 2023. The San Jose Mercury News series written by Gary Webb, documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991; National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations.). The. The CIA's front company, Air America was alleged to have profited from transporting opium and heroin on behalf of Hmong leader Vang Pao,[15][16] or of "turning a blind eye" to the Laotian military doing it. [22], In early October, 1996, a front-page article in The Washington Post [23] by reporters Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus, argued that "available information" did not support the series's claims, and that "the rise of crack" was "a broad-based phenomenon" driven in numerous places by diverse players. Barry Seal was indicted several times in 3 different states and protected from prosecution by the U.S Attorney Generals office and the D.E.A. An example of drug trafficking is someone making methamphetamines in his basement. ", "I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government air bases. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. Let me be frank about what we are finding. According to the DEA, the CIA has been sharing drug intelligence with the DEA since it was given a drug intelligence mandate in the early 1970s. Before the creation of the CIA in 1947, Allen Dulles assembled the Flying Tigers, an inner clique within the Office of Strategic Services . When Attorney General Janet Reno determined that a delay was no longer necessary, the report was released unchanged. Participation of narcotics traffickers in Contra supply operations through business relationships with Contra organizations. Carlos Cabezas, convicted of conspiracy to traffic cocaine, said that the profits from his crimes "belonged to the Contra revolution." A 1986 investigation by a sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (the Kerry Committee), found that "the Contra drug links included", among other connections, "[] payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies. [52] Hitz stated that: Volume II will be devoted to a detailed treatment of what was known to CIA regarding dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the Contra program or the Contra movement that were the subject of any sort of drug trafficking allegations. His articles asserted that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of drugs into the U.S. by the Contra personnel and directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras. McCoy has also written that during the 1980s "to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, backed Afghan warlords who used the Agency's arms, logistics, and protection to become major drug lords. [28], Surprised by The Washington Post article, Mercury News executive editor Jerome Ceppos wrote to the Post defending the series. "[1], The charges of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking were revived in 1996, when a newspaper series by reporter Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News claimed that the trafficking had played an important role in the creation of the crack cocaine drug problem in the United States. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking They used contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the U.S. Costa Rica was not the only route. it would not be the first time that the DEA has stumbled on major CIA drug . [33], The Honduran drug lord Juan Matta-Ballesteros was the owner of SETCO, an airline which the Nicaraguan Contras used to covertly transport military supplies and personnel in the early 1980s. Regarding issues raised in the series' shorter sidebar stories, it found that some in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala. Several also said they supplied information about the smuggling to U.S. When some authority wasnt clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation. The Royal Laotian Air Force had almost no light planes that could land on the dirt runways near the mountaintop poppy fields. search query for foia err: -a a + aa a + a. laotian official involvement in drug trafficking ", "Drugs, Corruption, and Justice in Vietnam and Afghanistan: A Cautionary Tale", "11, "Opium, the China Lobby, and the CIA", Dark Alliance: CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Overview of CIA/IG Investigation (January 29, 1998), Report of InvestigationVolume I: The California Story (January 29, 1998), Report of Investigation Volume II: The Contra Story (October 8, 1998), Congressional Testimony of Peter Kornbluh, Involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking, Official reports by the U.S. Government on the CIA, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking&oldid=1133990201, Central Intelligence Agency controversies, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles to be expanded from February 2010, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 16 January 2023, at 13:23. [3] The United States Department of State responded to the initial allegations stating that they were "unable to find any evidence to substantiate them, much less proof. The first one, "The California Story", was issued in a classified version on December 17, 1997, and in an unclassified version on January 29, 1998. Hallucinogens are drugs that affect sensation, thinking, self-awareness, and emotion. Im not making up the stories; we saw it on television. By Ian Stuart. Among its officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including former CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers. The . The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to support their struggle. If they remove Ahmed Wali, the Taliban will fill the void. [41], Alfred McCoy has argued that the CIA had fostered heroin production in Afghanistan for decades to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of communism, and later to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of the Islamic state. Drug trafficking is the process by which individuals manufacture and distribute illegal drugs throughout the country. [33] He did this in a column that appeared on November 3, defending the series, but also committing the paper to a review of major criticisms. A number of writers have alleged that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in the Nicaraguan Contras' cocaine trafficking operations during the 1980s Nicaraguan civil war. The Plain of Jars had been captured by Pathet Lao fighters in 1964, which resulted in the Royal Lao Air Force being unable to land its C-47 transport aircraft on the Plain of Jars for opium transport. 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